Pre-hung doors can be either interior doors or exterior doors and, as the name implies, are manufactured to be already mounted, or hung, within the border of a door jam. The use of pre-hung doors effectively eliminates the need to fashion a door jam on the work site, including routing out locations on the door or door jam to accommodate the hinge hardware and arranging the door for proper swinging. Thus, pre-hung doors greatly reduce the time and labor necessary to install doors.
Door jams typically comprise two vertical side jams, a hinge jam and a strike jam, and a header fitted across the top, between the side jams. A sill may also be fitted beneath the bottom of the door, between the side jams. Pre-hung doors are typically prepped for the installation of lock sets, via the milling of a face bore and an edge bore in the body of the door, but are not actually fitted with the knobs, striker plates, latch and other hardware.
Pre-hung doors are thus attached to the hinge jam via known hinge hardware, but are capable of freely swinging in and out of the door jam due to the lack of any restraining latch hardware. As will be appreciated, freely-swinging doors pose a problem during shipping, as well as possibly causing injury to the door itself. Moreover, it is also important to prevent the door from rubbing against the inside of the strike jam, which may cause damage to the door jam as well as the door. It is therefore imperative to at least temporarily arrest the freely-swinging nature of pre-hung doors.
There are several known devices which effectively arrest the freely-swinging motion of a pre-hung door during transportation and the like. One method relies upon actually nailing the strike jam to the door itself. Another method utilizes plastic straps or inserts which are then stapled or nailed to the door jam and door. All of these methods obviously injure the integrity of the door and door jam, and thus repairs must be made prior to use of the pre-hung door.
In addition to the concerns expressed above, pre-hung doors, once transported to a work site and set in place, must also be able to be selectively actuated in order to provide ingress and egress for workers, inspectors or the like. That is, once the known arresting devices are removed from installed pre-hung doors in order to permit swinging access therethrough, there still must be a way to selectively retain the doors in a closed position in order to prevent the entry of unwanted materials or animals, as well as to prevent heat loss when construction occurs during periods of cold temperatures.
Traditionally, pieces of scrap wood, nails, sticks or the like are inserted into the face and edge bores of the door to extend into the strike bore of the strike jam, thereby preventing the door from swinging open. In addition to the possibility of damaging the door or door jam, these items frequently fall out or break and are quickly rendered ineffective.
With the forgoing problems and concerns in mind, it is the general object of the present invention to provide a temporary door latch assembly that releasably holds a pre-hung door within a door jam during transport, while also being selectively operable to enable the door to move between a latched position and a non-latched position.